Science Quote by Robert T. Bakker

Bakker’s line reads like a small grenade tossed into the tidy storybook of evolution. In the old, comfortable version, dinosaurs were sluggish reptiles until a convenient asteroid cleared the stage for mammals to finally shine. Bakker, one of the loudest advocates for warm-blooded, active dinosaurs, flips that script harder than the sentence’s casual tone suggests: if dinosaurs were warm-blooded, then their rise wasn’t a takeover of “cold” by “warm” but a replacement of one high-performance strategy by another.

The specific intent is argumentative, even if it’s phrased as a shrugging “to me it seems.” He’s nudging the reader toward a reframing: endothermy (or something close to it) wasn’t mammals’ secret weapon waiting in the wings. It may have already existed in “advanced” mammal ancestors that lost ecological ground anyway. That “also” at the end is doing heavy rhetorical work. It’s a needle: you thought mammals had the monopoly on warmth? So did a lot of 20th-century paleontology.

Subtextually, Bakker is defending a broader thesis associated with the “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the 1960s-80s: dinosaurs as dynamic, competitive animals. If warm-blooded mammals still got outcompeted, then the determining factors shift to ecology, life history, growth rates, and sheer evolutionary experimentation - not a single physiological trump card.

Context matters: Bakker is speaking from a period when “warm-blooded dinosaur” was both a scientific proposal and a cultural provocation, aimed at dismantling Victorian-era assumptions about reptilian inferiority. The slightly messy phrasing is almost the point: this is thought in motion, challenging what counts as “advanced” in the first place.